just like, okay, I gotta move on with the rest of my life. This chapter is over on the bet that we made failed. So I fall asleep. I wake up the next day, I immediately go look at our stats, and I'm like, Oh,

we just generated $400,000 in revenue yesterday.

So this is working. Holy fuck. This is actually working. We're winning today. We have a entrepreneur and investor. Suman Ali is founder of several companies, Tiny Co. Which, if you ever played the family Guy mobile game or the Harry Potter mobile game you were playing with his handiwork. He has built and sold multiple companies. He's an investor in over 40 companies, and we're here to hear that story of how he made his 1st 1,000,000 It's a wild, wacky story where you won't believe the way you have to hear it to believe. He's telling us about his first company, his second company. Some of the investments he's made conversation. Here we go.

Okay. All right. We're rolling. This is my 1st 1,000,000 podcast where we talked to entrepreneurs investors to find out the back stories of their businesses. We want to hear the good, the bad, the ugly, the untold stories behind how they built their fortune. We have our guest here today, Suleiman Ali of Ali Capital and of tiny co fame. So you get the best way to describe you Would be You're an entrepreneur started and sold multiple companies. Now, maybe three companies invested in 40 Some odd other companies. You're a great friend of mine, and I'm glad to have you on the pot. You don't usually do podcasts. My first question is, why is that?

I think I'm just a little shy about talking about myself in this public way. But since you're doing it, I had to get on and be supportive

of what Europe to. OK, good. And of course, this is the podcast where I'm looking to find the back stories. So we often hear. I remember when I moved to Silicon Valley six years ago. Before then, I was sitting in Australian. I was reading TechCrunch and I was reading books and blog's, and at first I wanted to know tactics. But what I realized I actually liked a lot more was hearing the back stories, the failures, the successes, the trials and tribulations that it took for people to achieve what they did achieve because everybody story ends up being different. But when you hear so many hundreds of entrepreneur stories, you end up finding the commonalities,

the patterns, and that could be the motivation for you to continue. So my hope with this podcast is too find guests like you who have incredible stories here, the unwind all those stories from the beginning and let the listeners use this as motivation. I don't if you know this, but there will be hundreds of thousands of people who are putting in their headphones in the morning listening to this on their way to work on their commute to a job that, you know, maybe they don't love. And they're dreaming of starting their own business some day. And ah, the responsibility is yours, my friend Teoh, to make it worth their while and give him a little inspiration

today. That's great. I think I can do it. I remember being in that same place, having a job that I wasn't excited about and feeling like I was sort of stuck on this path, and so I'm really excited to share my story, and hopefully that inspires people toe, find their own path in

life. All right, so OK, let's start there. Then what was? What was that job and what were you doing and how'd you get off that path?

So I started computer science, an undergrad at Georgia Tech. I graduated, and I was really excited about graduating. I was really excited. Entering the real world, I interviewed a 10 or 20 different companies. I got a job at Microsoft that was probably the best of the companies that interviewed at. I had the hardest interview and was really prestigious at the time. So I started in January 2000 and four at Microsoft, and I remember on my first day I get there, go to the employees new training thing. One of the senior vice president of Microsoft is there, introducing himself, telling us his story, telling us why he's so passionate about being at Microsoft. And I'm just so excited.

I then go to my office at Microsoft. It's in this other building. I walk there. There's all these people that are young and excited about what they're doing. I get to my office, it's got my name on the door, Somebody shows up and was like, Hey, I'm Eric. I've set up your computer for you. This is your phone. And

I was like, Oh, wow. Feeling like a king? Yeah, I was just not

accepting this kind of treatment. And so I arrived and thought, Wow, this is amazing. I'm, like, a really professional, and I've arrived. I'm getting the respect that I deserve. Even though I probably didn't really deserve any respect at this point, I don't nothing. And the first thing I do is I pick up my office phone. I called my dad and I say, Hey, Dad, this is my new phone number. Whatever you're trying to call me,

call me at this number. This from my office that I'm calling you right now and he says, Ah, that's all great. You know, cool your gun office, and this is all great that you're excited about what you're doing. But really, you should quit your job immediately and start your own company. That's really where the action is at. You know, I was like my dad. He's always pushing me to do this. I kind of talked to my mom and my mom was like, This is so great that you're working at Microsoft. I'm telling all of my friends and she was like, the marriage proposals are just going to start coming just from the fact that you work at Microsoft. And so that's kind of my first day in my first time having a real

job, right in the moment you realized your dad is gonna be hard to please. Yeah,

My dad is insatiable in his appetite. So he's 80 now, And whenever I call him or talked to him, he's got new business ideas. He reads all about tech and, you know, always be asking me, What do you think of over stock Price? What do you think of Airbnb? When is gonna go public? So he's really passionate about entrepreneurship in general. His goal in life at the moment is to buy Tea Garden. She had a Teeguarden when he was younger in Bangladesh, and he really wants to buy a tea garden because he sees that as his legacy that will own as a family for hundreds of years, and it will continue to generate revenue and employ hundreds of people for hundreds of years.

The Rockefellers of tea. Yeah, that's his dream for share. Awesome. Awesome. So? So if we book and the story because I think what's interesting is the beginning in the end and then figuring out how did point a lead Dizzy, Right? So if the beginning is, you get to Microsoft, their names on the door of your office, you sit down, you call your dad from your office landline and you say, Hey, there's my new office number And then today you know where I met you. You know, one of the reasons this called how I got rich podcast is because it's not about money.

It's about sort of lifestyle, of being able to do what you want when you want on your own terms, and and you are somebody who does that. I see today where you start businesses, you sell them. You invest in a number of companies. You're an investor in maybe 12 13 venture capital funds you have control over your time. It will be the middle of the day and you'll be working out. It will be, you know, the next week you'll be in London or Japan and doing something completely different and So I think is gonna be interesting is to figure out from that first day at Microsoft, how did you end up getting the financial freedom to be living the life you live today? So let's pick up. Basically, you're at Microsoft. You were excited about the job. Was that just a false promise, or did you actually enjoy what you were up to and then eventually decide to leave? I guess. How did that go?

At Microsoft? I was really excited by my job. It was working with a bunch of other people who I thought were really brilliant, passionate about their work. But I think after six or 12 months at Microsoft, I got a sense of OK, this is not really where I'm gonna be able to make my mark. Nothing that I do will enable me to really make a mark here.

And why is that? Just a big company? You know, you're just a small fish in a big pond. What was the reason? Why did you come to that conclusion?

Yeah, I think no matter how much I how hard I worked are the sort of quality of my work I would get promoted every six or 12 months, something along those lines. But those promotions didn't really do much from a sphere of influence or authorship over what I got to work on. And I just realized that that was never gonna happen. So actually, what happened for me is I started at one team, and then I switched to this other team inside Microsoft that was building a new product from scratch called the Windows Home Server team is run by this guy, Charlie Kindle, who'd been at Microsoft 25 years at this point. And he had a fantastic career at Microsoft. He sort of started three or four startups within Microsoft and had a really good time doing that. And he had joined Microsoft early enough where the stock that he had was worth a lot of money. He had a house on a lake in a boat, and I was like, Wow, this guy's living the life that I wanna live But I realized that because I joined Microsoft 20 years after he had,

there's no way I was gonna be able to achieve that same success at Microsoft in the same time period that that he had so I I just felt like I'm doing good work. People are valuing the work that I'm doing, but I'm still stuck within a specific team at Microsoft, and I can't really come up with an idea that somebody at Microsoft will say, That's great. We're gonna go fund that. And I could only work within the construct of Microsoft, which is your A software engineer or program manager on some team working on some project. And I felt over time like those were chains that wouldn't let me do something beyond that. And really, when I when I graduated undergrad, you know, you put objective on your resume. The objective I put on my resume was too fully exploit what my mind and hands were capable of doing. And I just felt like which is just thinking about it now, such a piss and arrogant thing to do for a 23 year old kid.

Why do you say that? Because that sounds unusual, But I'm guessing if you were reading somebody's kind of resume today, somebody wanted to work with you. And they said, You know, I'm looking Teoh, maximize what I'm capable of in terms my mind in my hands with my abilities. I feel like you would like

that. I love that s So I think one of the great things about Silicon Valley is it's made for people that are of that mindset and want to be surrounded by people that are like that. What I was doing was putting it on resumes and applying to Microsoft National Instruments, right? Just giant companies where that isn't valued at that stage. So it's is this line of thinking that I think is the right line of thinking I want encourage everyone in their life to always be thinking in that way, whether they're Microsoft and 23 were Google and 60 I think you should just be thinking About what? What? What else should I be doing? What? All the other possibilities that I'm not seeking out by doing my current job.

And do you remember the day when you were like, Okay, this is this is the end of the Microsoft chapter

for me? Yes. I joined this team called Windows Home Server. We built a product over an 18 month period. I got to do all these things I wouldn't normally get to do at Microsoft cause I was one of the 1st 15 or 20 people on that team. That team grew to 95 people. So just for the level of experience I had, I just got toe sort of punch above my weight on that team and we were launching the product. We're announcing the products that was in stealth mode. Bill Gates was doing his last keynote at CS, and he announced a product as part of that keynote. The whole team was down there in Vegas, manning the boots and talking about the product to people who are coming up at CS and asking, what is what Windows Home Server. Why would I want one? And Bill Gates announces the product. It is keynote.

We then all go out to dinner as a team. The guy who ran our product called Windows Home Server, was this guy, Charlie Kindle. He gets up in front of everyone in Las Vegas. Teoh do a toast and he just starts crying because he's so passionate and so excited to see this baby of his born. And I looked at him and was like, Wow, this is amazing. This guy is in his forties and he's crying about this product being born. And I realized that even though I really loved what I was doing, I didn't feel that sense of authorship over the product and that I would not feel the way that he's feeling at Microsoft ever. So. I decided then and there that I wanted to quit. So when we got back from C. S,

I went to his office and told him, Hey, I got I got to do what you're doing here. I don't think I would be able to do that. Microsoft. I want to go out into the real world and do it. One of the other funny things is when you're at a big company, you're living in this bubble inside the big company, where all of your peers air, talking about what's happening at the big company and all the press that you're reading, all the blog's and information that you're reading is about that company. I remember quitting and leaving Microsoft and being like, Wow, I was stuck inside this bubble and there's a whole big wide world out here. I remember sending an email with somebody and saying, Wow, I felt like I was in a prison of my own making by

being at Microsoft, right? Wow. And so now you you leave Microsoft, you know what you're gonna do next, or you just know enough that will get you started. Where were you at mentally at that time?

Yes. So a lot of people I told all my peer group that I was leaving and they were like, Why would you leave Microsoft such a cushy gig? You're making so much money and you're going to take this risk by leaving. Why are you going to take that risk? And I really think most people overestimate the risk that they're taking when they leave their job. The unemployment rate in the United States is sub 4%. For people who are competent and skilled in their line of work, it's easy for them to go back to their job. I think if I quit Microsoft started a company and failed for a year or two or three, I could go back to Microsoft and actually get higher position than what I would have if I had stayed just cause even Microsoft values that entrepreneurial experience that people will have. So I think people in general overestimate the amount of risk. So I left. I didn't really know anything about what I was going to do, except I was gonna move to Silicon Valley. I've been reading TechCrunch and went to an event that Michael Arrington hosted in Seattle for TechCrunch and was just like, Oh,

this is where the action is at. I've got to be down there. I just know that when I get down there, I'll meet people that are like minded and figure out what to do with myself. I was just so excited to do it that I just quit. So I went to visit my parents in Florida before moving out to Silicon Valley just to say hello to them. After three days, I was totally bored, all my friends from high school, and moved out of Florida, and I just didn't know what to do with myself. So I said, OK, let's start working on something right now. I had not done any software engineering or coding at Microsoft for several years at this point, so those skills were rusty.

I said, OK, let me just start working on something. Facebook had announced the Facebook platform right when I had left Microsoft of the day that I left and I said, Okay, this is something that seems really easy. I could make a Web app I can put on Facebook, and it's just a good way for me to get my feet wet and building something and learning how to code again. So I did exactly that. I got a friend of mine named Jamal from George Attack to start working with me on it. And we made it together and took us about two weeks to make and we launched it. Our goal really was to get 100 people to use it ever. And we expected that 98 of those 100 people would be our friends.

And what was it at this time you built? What was the first idea?

Eso the first app we made was called superlatives. The idea was really simple. You got to pick a superlative and give it to your friends. So we made a bunch of really funny superlatives, like most likely to wear a bunny costume for no apparent reason, most likely to get conned by old ladies in Las Vegas, things that we just thought were kind of off B and funny that you would want to give to a friend, and that friend would go to the app and give one back to you. So we launched on the Facebook platform, and within a month, 1,000,000 people had used it and our servers were melting. We didn't know anything about database architectures. Our database was melting that the APP was going down all the time. All these friends of mine were like, Did you make superlatives? I love it. This is amazing. I love using this thing. So it was just a smash

hit right away. And how did that feel for you? How is that different than what you had been doing up till that point? And I just like, What was it like when you woke up that, you know, the first morning when it started to click what was going through your head at that time? If you could go back to what you were feeling, then,

yeah, I think it was just joy. Pure joy and pride of this is a concept that we dreamed up. We made we launched and people are using it and they like it or love it, and we created something in the world that people are using, so just felt very. It was a very different kind of joy than any joy it experience that Microsoft

right? And Microsoft. I'm guessing it was more joy of. I got the approval and appreciation of the kind of my boss, the person above me or the peers around me versus this is almost like art. It's, you know, the market loves what I made.

Yeah, I think at Microsoft I was constantly focused on impressing somebody. Whether that was my boss or somebody else on the team or somebody else, I would go have lunch with that worked at Microsoft, and here I was focused on sort of my own values, doing something that I was proud of. And it's just a very different calculation that those two things

got. So it's you and Jamal Now. The servers are melting. What happens

next? So we very quickly learned how to make servers not melt. We find people who do my sequel consulting. They enable us to keep our servers up, and we just start making the product better and better, and it's really exciting. We then get a phone call from somebody who lives in Silicon Valley. And so, by the way, this whole time in Florida and Jamal

is in Atlanta and you're living in your childhood bedroom.

I'm living in my parent's house in the bedroom that I grew up in, and I'm sort of keeping the opposite schedule of them. They'll wake up early and go to sleep early, wake up really late at like six PM and stay up all night working on the product. So I get this phone call from this guy. His name's novel Robert Kahn. Never heard of this guy before

and he just called you.

Yeah, actually, I think we might have initiated it. We reached out to some other Facebook app and said, Hey, we have a question about Facebook platform or question about how you're growing so quickly, Can we talk to you? And novel was a guy behind that app, and he called us

Okay, what is it will have to say of all who is now, You know, I guess, for those who don't know it of all the founder of Angel List, one of the most sort of famous and respected people here in Silicon Valley today, and at that time he was also a kind of well known entrepreneur. And did you know who he was at

the time? So I didn't know who he was at the time. He had started a angel fund called Hit Forge and was investing out of that fund, and he was really excited about the Facebook platform and was investing in companies on the Facebook platform. So I get on the phone with him this the first time I'm talking to anyone who's a true Silicon Valley person in my life, and he's like, Hey, love what you're doing I think it could be really big. I want to meet you in person. How do we make that happen? And, you know, I'm kind of waffling about how to make that happen, and he cuts through all the bullshit in my head and says, What's it gonna take to get you on a plane tomorrow to come meet me here in San Francisco? And I say, OK,

I can do that

right on. So I buy a one way ticket to San Francisco and come out here and meet with him. His office is in Soma in San Francisco, and it's really it's surrounded by homeless people. It's nondescript. Feels like a warehouse. It's empty. So immediately get the heebie jeebies from from it. He's a super nice guy. Super clearly very intelligent. Clearly got a ton of experience in Silicon Valley, and he's got that Silicon Valley ethos of anybody can do anything. The next person I meet might be the next Mark Zuckerberg building the Next Big Thing. And so I meet with him. He takes me out to lunch. She asked me a bunch of questions. Those questions are really designed to get a sense of m.

I technical. What's sort of my level of ambition and am I an entrepreneur, My sort of made of the same cloth that entrepreneurs are that he is. And I think he concludes in lunch that yes to all three of those and says, Okay, great. During lunch, he says, I want to invest you. I'm gonna wire you 200 K. Let's go back to my office

and you're not even asking for investment.

Yeah, I don't really. We didn't really need investment. We didn't actually know what we needed,

so I wasn't asking for

anything. I was just kind of like I'm here, you know, something I don't teach me. That's kind of the way I approach it. Like he was Yoda. We go back to his office, he prints out a term sheet and he says, Sign it, not wire you the money right now. I read the term sheet and I don't actually understand any of the words on the term sheet. I don't end up signing it and don't end up sort of taking his capital. But

did you give him? Ah, let me think about this. Touch. My lawyers are this Looks like it's in Portuguese to me. What did you tell him at the time? Teoh Exit

gracefully. Yeah. I said, this is really exciting. You're awesome. I love meeting you. I want to work with people like you. I want to work with you. I don't understand what this is. It's all little to sudden for me. So let me go home and kind of think about this and I'll follow up. And of all to his credit, is when he knows what he wants, is just aggressive and is like, sign it right now. Kind of the same way he was about me coming to San Francisco. He was like, Just eliminate. Let's eliminate all the bullshit that you've got your head. Let's sign this right now and start working together immediately.

I just tough first date, but a great businessman but a tough first date there he was looking for marriage. Yeah,

I like. I really appreciated that approach. And also now that I understand term sheets I went back and looked at that term sheet once. It was a super entrepreneur, friendly term sheet. He is such a great guy for not like it was all common stock. It wasn't preferred stock. The term sheet is just set up in a super entrepreneur friendly way. So I appreciate that he was doing that. So I have the meeting with him, and then I'd set up a meeting with Slide Slide. Was this other company that it started making Facebook APS And it was venture funded run by this guy, Max Levchin and this guy key three boy. So I had set up a meeting with those guys, too. I go over there, meet,

meet them and they start asking me questions, and I very quickly realized. OK, this is actually an interview where they're trying to see if I want to be an engineer or a product manager at the slide team. And having just left Microsoft, I'm like, I don't really want to do that. And I remember this moment where Keith says, Okay, well, we really like what you've built, but, you know, he opens the door to the room we're in, and he's like, Do you hear that?

That's all the engineers that I have working it slide, and it's gonna take them about 30 minutes to copy everything that you've done and integrate it with top friends, their biggest Facebook app. And I think the biggest Facebook happened the world at the time. And then you're gonna be toasts. And I was like, Oh, wow, right, Like, that's, um, hard love that you're giving me here, but, you know, for me at the time,

I just worked on it for a couple of weeks and it didn't mean anything to me. So I was like, You know, if you want it, you can just have this app and it's not a big deal, but what you can't have is my time. I'm not gonna come work for you or for slide, even though I really respect what you guys were doing. And you guys are really brilliant. That's kind of how the meetings in San Francisco went. I went back to Florida and I was like, Wow, this is actually what I'm working on. I seen as kind of the silly, trivial Facebook app, And I was like,

Oh, that's not what this is. This is actually a business. These people out there respect what I'm doing and they've got a vision for the future where people are gonna be buying airline tickets on Facebook and commerce is gonna be happening on Facebook. So let me start buying into that vision and seeing what we can build. So I moved to Atlanta where I'd gone to undergrad on or Jamal was. We started working out of my sister's apartment, showed a two bedroom apartment, took one of the bedrooms, took all the living room furniture, sold it and turned it into an office. We put ads up on superlatives, and those ads started generating revenue. We use that revenue to hire a couple of Georgia tech employees. Georgia Tech grads or Georgia Tech interns on. We just start making superlatives better.

We start making more APS Superlative grows to about 10 million users. Over time, we make other APS that end up also getting millions of people using them. And so, for a couple of months, we think, Wow, we're really good at this, right? Look at us. We didn't need them money from those way hired. All these people, they work for us where their boss, we keep coming with great ideas for what to build, and we launch it and ends up being successful. So we just felt really good

about ourselves, The mightiest touch at the time. And this was the Facebook today so that the people you're talking about are, you know, from novel who's kind of like a luminary in Silicon Valley. Keith and Max are, you know, the ex PayPal guys who have done amazing things, you know, from from slide onward, really? And here you are, sitting in Georgia and your sister's apartment and, ah, things were going well. You can't You could do no wrong at this point.

Yeah, that's certainly how it feels, But we very quickly realized that Oh, Wow, We don't know what we're doing, and we made a lot of mistakes here. So we realized that people that we hired actually weren't that good and we didn't know what to do about that. In some cases, the where our strategy would work is I would wake up in the morning and come up with an idea and fall in love with the idea and say, OK, everybody, stop what you're doing Let's work on this idea And the idea would be a compelling sort of viral social thing, like superlatives was where you send it to your friends and then your friends log in and they send it to you and then 10 of their friends. So all of a sudden it starts growing sort of exponentially, without spending any money doing user acquisition or tryingto market the product in any way. So we're really good at coming up with things like that. But we didn't really have a sense of what metrics were valuable were what was the value that we were actually creating.

So, for example, today a lot of social actual track things like monthly, active users and daily active users we didn't track those things we just tracked how many people had ever used our app. So we were optimizing for fundamentally the wrong thing. What you want to optimize for is building something that people are gonna use constantly for a long period of time. Frequently, ideally, we were optimizing for something that people would touch, get 10 of their friends to use but never come back. Teoh. So we realized that, Okay, this thing that we've built is kind of valuable. What should we do next? So I came out to Silicon Valley and met with a couple other people and you know,

folks like Nerve all Keith and Max Levchin. Those guys are Silicon Valley luminaries today and they were Silicon Valley luminaries then. But I feel like they've sort of ah 100 Ext from the time that I met them in terms of the clarity of who they are as individuals and the work that they like to do as individuals. And you know, of all I think of as one of the preeminent philosophers of our time in the same way that people thought about Russo were contour other philosophers in previous ages, we were quickly realizing the shortcomings of what we were building. We came out to Silicon Valley to raise money. We got a couple of people who were like, Yeah, I like what you guys were doing. I like you guys want to invest, but we realize that we didn't really have a sense for what we should build next. And we then two said, Okay, let's try to sell this thing instead. We don't really know how toe go about selling a business.

So we thought, OK, the best thing we need to do is talk to people who are in this space, goto every event and conference. It's in this space and see if we can sort of catalyze a chemical reaction or an acquisition in that way. So we went Teoh this event called graphing social patterns. In San Diego. We get there. It's all people who are building APS on the Facebook platform of lots of different varying levels of success, and we've got sort of a middle level of success. At the time, there was ah website that tracked how many people had ever used one of your Facebook APS by company, and we were in the top 10 companies there. So we go to this event, we meet this guy Shervin pish of our And he says, I love what you guys were doing. Wanna buy you guys? So let's go to lunch and talk about it. We go to

lunch. Super Mission accomplished. Yeah, I met a guy who wanted to buy the company.

Yeah, it's crazy. It's a crazy story. So we meet this guy goes to lunch with us. It's sort of again tests us in the same way novel did of Are you technical? Are you entrepreneurial? What's your level of ambition? And says, OK, I want to do this deal He writes a number. Sherman has ah, riel flair for the dramatic in the best kind of way. So he writes a number on a napkin, turns it over, slides it to us. We look at it and we immediately say, Okay, let's do this deal. It was a $2 million number on the napkin, and we started the company in sort of nine months

ago. What could he have written on that napkin that you would have said yes to? Was that like, you know, was that your minimum there or a heady written 200,000. Would you have also said

Sure. Take it. Yeah, we would have probably said yes to any number, Frankly. So at the time when I was at Microsoft, I was making $76,000 a year. So he offered us $2 million for nine months worth of work and really nine months worth of work where we felt like we just made a ton of first time entrepreneur mistakes. So we felt really good about the two. We felt overjoyed over the moon about the $2 million number. I think we would have probably the exact same feeling if the number was 200,000.

Right. Okay, so he slides over the napkin. Do you even look at Jamal? You both. You both just say yes without even having consult each other. Yeah,

that's that's the weird thing is it's like we I think we probably looked at each other for a second and immediately said yes. So we didn't negotiate in any way and yeah, we just said yes immediately.

And I remember when you first told me this is the story that not in so much detail, but there was sort of a string attached of it wasn't just buying, do you? He's rolling up a couple companies, so you had a little bit more work to do it at this conference. That correct?

Yes. So what Sherman was doing was a strategy that's called roll up. So you get somebody to back you and give you a big check. In this case, he'd gotten Venture Capitalist to give him $15 million. He's going to use that $15 million to buy up the top five players in the space, combine them all together with the goal of you know, that cost $10 million but creates 50 million or $100 million of value. And that's what his goal, Waas. And so he went on to at that conference and bought a couple other companies as well.

You've now got a win under your belt. You don't have to go work there. Or did you spend a little bit of time at that company

as well? Yes. So we moved the whole team out to our alto, which is where the company was called. SGN is based. We stay there for a couple of months, and I moved to New York City because I've always wanted to live in New York City, and I just wanted to start a new company, and it was a great way to sort of leave SGN by moving across the country.

Gotcha. And so that was maybe, you know, baseball analogy. That was the single. And then here come the home runs on DSO. You don't like to brag about it, but I'll brag for you a little bit. So here's the spoiler. The next couple of chapters for you were huge hits. You built a company that got backed by Mark and reason. Andreessen Horowitz, one of the top firms in the world. Markers on your board. I think you took that company. You ended up selling it for, Let's say,

many buckets of money, many more than the first company. And then you did with your brother. You built a company called Native, which for anybody out there who is looking for deodorant, no better dealer in the world. The native, which he sold to Procter and Gamble and so many big hits were to come. So let's jump through those real quick about how you you know, how you took that first win. The small win, um, and parlayed it into bigger wins.

Yes, I felt really good about the win, and it definitely immediately felt like a win. And I said, OK, this is good, but let's take all of the lessons that I learned the first time and apply them and try and build a company that's 10 x more valuable or ah, 100 acts more valuable and immediately sort of got the entrepreneurial bug and said, Okay, I'm gonna do this for the rest

of my life. And by the way, what was your dad saying? You know, Dad, who was like, Hey, you got to get out of Microsoft. You need to go start a business at this point. What was Dad saying? Kind of after the first Facebook at the superlatives? Did he even see that as a business? Or was he like you're wasting your time with this? You know which of my friends gonna wear a bunny suit game?

Yes, and my parents were really funny. They, no matter what business me year or my brother start, are really dismissive about it. And they say, Oh, this isn't a real business until we sell the business, and then when the business is sold, they're like, Oh, I knew the whole time that you were gonna win with this business. I love this business the whole time. So I think for my parents, when the company sold, they were like, Oh,

wow. Mom was like, I can now have a new story to tell about you, which is you're an entrepreneur. You started and sold the company, so she was feeling pretty good. And I think my dad was like, Okay, my son is now following in my footsteps of starting companies and trying to create value on his own as an entrepreneur. So I think he was

also proud. Gotcha. Okay, So you wanted to start a new business. You decided to stay on the Facebook platform. Is that right? That's where all the action was. Or what was the felt process

there? Yes, actually, I got together with a friend of mine from high school named in Spivey in New York City. We started jamming together at cafes and in New York City, just trying to come up with ideas for what to work on. So we go start working together and spend about 12 months working on a bunch of really bad ideas.

But what sort of bad ideas?

There's a company called Daily Candy, which was a newsletter for women that Comcast bought for $400 million. So we were like the newsletter business. We've got to be in this newsletter business. We thought that Green Energy was a big deal, so we thought we got to be in the green energy business in some

way. So you launched a green energy newsletter. Yeah, well, that's exactly

what we did. You want to, really? We launched a Green energy newsletter, and very quickly we realized we don't know anything about the newsletter business. We should stop doing this all together. One of the other ideas we had was building Twitter for colleges, so we felt like college you're talking to and meeting all kinds of new people. And instead of using Twitter, which is this generic platform, we could build sort of a local Twitter, which tells you about parties and events and things that are happening on the college campus. We've worked on that for about three months before we kind of gave up and said, Oh, You know what Twitter for colleges is just Twitter or actually ended up being just Facebook. So we kind of stopped working on that idea, and then we kind of came back to the Facebook platform because we felt like we had had enough failures where we wanted something that was that we felt like it was more likely to

succeed. And where was your confidence at this time? Were you sort of humbled? Okay, last few ideas. They're not taken off like I hoped. You know, where was your confidence levels at? Because I think that's always interesting, right? Like as an entrepreneur, you some people are blessed with this confidence. That's unshakable. And it just never wavers. And we hear about that a lot. But I think in reality, most people have confidence of sort of ebbs and flows sometimes,

depending on the traction, sometimes dependent on really small things, like, you know, one specific investors confidence in you, or you know, something your mentor tells you. And so yeah, give me Give me a sense of your psychology at that time. What were you thinking? How are you feeling?

Yeah, I would say I always have this weird level of confidence that whatever I'm gonna work out, I'm gonna will to success. So that's sort of this confidence that is this the sort of Omni President confidence that applies to anything that I work on. There have definitely been times where I realized what I'm working on is not a good idea. And I just wasted six months of my life and the life of my colleagues. And then I sort of realized that maybe I'm not actually very good at entrepreneurship or building companies or building products. So I would say there's definitely this ebb and flow based on when I start a new idea. I have a lot of confidence and excitement for it as I build it. That confidence sort of builds as I launch it. Generally, when you launch something, you're met with resistance. So I expect some amount of resistance, and that resistance dramatically decreases my level of confidence. And then over time, I just end up sticking with something and persevering and focusing on willing it to success. And that ends up leading to growth and success over time. And as that happens, my confidence sort of

increases conscious and so Okay, so you decide to go back in the face with platform and so just talk a little bit about what was Tiny co. There's a story within the story there of, you know, there was what was tiny co. And then what happened? And so I want to get to the what happened. But first set the stage. What was time to go and how did it even become time

to go in? And I started company called Tiny Co. We started making gains on the Facebook platform the iPhone launched in 2008 and then in 2009 they launched the APP store with in APP purchases. So we said, Oh wow, this is actually an amazing platform. Nobody else is on it. And we started a company called High Nico that made mobile games for iPhones.

And so why was called tiny code? By the way,

we were looking for domain names that were really cheap and fun and tiny co we bought for $700. All the other domain names and ideas that we had were very expensive. That's how we arrived at the name Tiny coat. One of our engineers, Bo she came

up with the name Gotcha. Okay, and then I have a quote somewhere here. So this is the quote from I think it's Ben Horowitz. He's writing on the injuries and Horowitz Blawg about Tiny Costa. The blood title was, ah, big opportunity for Tiny Co. And he says, You know, he describes the company that, and he says, despite terrific early traction and what appears to be a massive market, it would be too early for us to invest in this type of company unless we believe that the entrepreneur behind it was so skilled, determined and talented that he would build the team that wins the market. That's pretty

good. Yeah, it's

amazing. How does that feel? Feels good Drink that won it eso print

that out and put it in my room. And every time I argue with my girlfriend and

give this, I almost printed that out. That's my friend that they're talking about over there. So Okay, so you get this backing and you're in this market that everyone thinks maybe at this time, you know, the sort of forward looking people are thinking, Hey, Mobile is gonna be big. Mobile games could be big and, ah, you're in that space. And so what happens is the take off right away, like the first idea or where you met with a lot of resistance.

We get immediate traction when we launch our first mobile game. So first game was called tappers a word. We launch it. We do, ah, marketing partnership with a friend of mine from Microsoft named Leland, and he'd started a company called Tap Joy. That's a mobile ad network where in tap Cherie promotes our game tap resort, and by promoting it, they push it in the top five free APS on the iPhone app store. So we get hundreds of thousands of downloads immediately and those downloads air turning into revenue. So in the first month of launch, we generate 5 $600,000 of revenue. Not bad. So we immediately are like, Oh, wow, this is successful and working. We had a couple other side projects or skunk works projects that we were working on, and we say Let's immediately stop working on those and focus on making mobile games because we think this is a place where we can win

and so you start building mobile games like Tap Resort and I guess, take me through because there's a but that comes up so things are going well. But what happens?

So things were going well. We launched, happens or generates 500,000 revenue the first month and sort of keeps doing that. In subsequent months, we launch another game and now are generating another 4 $500,000 a month in revenue from that game. So what a 10 11 million revenue run rate per year. A bunch of veces notice us and say, Love what you guys were doing. Want to meet with you? We take one of the meetings and they say, We want to invest in your company. We really believe in the mobile game space and we want to be investors in the space. So we take the meeting and you know, our intent initially is not to raise venture capital. We like the fact that we own the company and that we haven't raising the outside capital. But the venture capitalist capital firms start asking questions that make us realize Wow, these guys know what they're doing and are asking questions that are going to guide us in a way that we're not gonna be able to guide ourselves.

So we decide. Okay, we do want to raise venture capital money so they give us a term sheet. We then take that term sheet and go up and down sandal road and pitched a bunch of other VC firms. Eso end up getting a handful of term sheets. The one that we like the most is in recent Horowitz, Andreessen, Horowitz. Just Their process is really different for evaluating an investment than most of the other firms. They ask us a bunch of questions that are specific to our business. And as we talk to them, you can sort of see the gears turning where they're connecting the dots and realizing how big an opportunity Tiny Co could be. So end up taking money from in recent HORWITZ $18 million first money into the company. Mark Anderson joins the board and we say, Great, we're gonna take this money and put it to work.

So we start doing that. We hire a bunch more people, we grow the team to about 80 people. We make a bunch more games. We take that money and start spending it to do customer acquisition, and that's all working and working really well. So we end up growing revenue to 20 million in the first year and then 40 million in the second year and worried about break even. You know, again, we're feeling really good about where we're at and the humbling events are yet to come and a bunch of companies air coming outs and say, We love what you guys are doing. We want toe acquire you and we say, Okay, we're not ready for an acquisition. We see the future to be bright, rosy.

What ends up happening is we run into this giant brick wall that we foolishly didn't see coming. We would spend about a dollar acquiring a customer and regenerate about $2.50 in net revenue from that customer. A bunch of Japanese mobile gaming companies were making so much money in Japan, but kind of saturating that market, and there was no more growth left there for them. So they were moving to the United States, opening up offices in San Francisco and saying, OK, we're gonna become dominant mobile game companies in the United States and they drove the cost of customer acquisition up from a dollar to $4 then to $6 eventually to $9 for the games that we were making in a matter of six months to that tick our unit economics and turned them upside down. That meant that every time we were spending money acquiring a customer, we were actually losing more money instead of making money. So that ended up being a giant problem for us. And

I can imagine way

went out to go raise new money. And every time you raise a new round of funding, I would say it becomes 10 times to 50 times harder to raise the next round of funding. You need better product market fit, better unit economics, more clarity on how you're gonna grow the company 10 times bigger than wherever you're at at the moment. And so the the guys were meeting us, the Siri's big investors and saying, Okay, we really like you guys. We like the business you've built, but it looks like the unit economics air kind of falling apart so we don't want to invest. So that becomes this real problem for us because we haven't been profitable. We have been running the company on profit because of these Japanese mobile gaming companies spending so much money on customer acquisition. We start losing money every month. So instead of being break even first, we're losing $200,000 a month,

and $500,000 a month on those numbers become pretty significant pretty quickly as the months go by. So you know, I think that one of the things you need to do is an entrepreneur is never lie to yourself about reality. It's very easy for an entrepreneur to lie to themselves about reality, especially when they've got investors that they always want to say that the nice thing to or the right thing to, especially when you've got employees and you always want to be your employees to be excited about your business and where you're going. So I definitely see as I've invested in companies now that entrepreneurs will lie to themselves about the reality of the market that they're in and kind of fumble the ball as a result of that. So I'd say one of the strengths of our team at the time was that we realized that okay, The reality that we're living in is not the same reality we were living in 12 months ago. Eso we're not gonna exist 12 months from now unless we do something dramatically different and we do it immediately with reckless

of ended. And you've told me this before and it stood out to me. And ever since, I've asked myself this question. Other companies that I'm investing in try to get a sense of is the founder looking reality in the face or is reality in the room? And they're just looking around there looking away from it. And the weird thing is that this even happens to really smart people, really talented people. There's sort of no correlation between just sort of intelligence and talent and this ability to look reality in the face, go more into detail. Next. I think this is super super important and can really skin tank years of effort if you do this wrong, and so it seems like something worth double clicking into

Yeah, I think it's really easy to get high on your own supply. It's really easy to look at the numbers and just look for the places where you've got traction and evidence that things are working. You want to succeed. You want to find evidence of that success. And as you're talking to your friends, your parents, you were investors, your employees. You also want to be successful. So it's very easy to seduce yourself into thinking that things are working when they're not. And there's so many outside external factors that help people think they're successful, even when a business is failing. So raising a new round of funding and those investors now believing in your planning on doing over the next 12 months getting press and press, talking about your company in this fantastic way, meeting with friends and only telling them about the things that are going right. Those are all the things that make it really easy to lose sight of reality.

So do you have some checks and balances? Do have a question. You ask yourself or a tactic that sort of prevents you from doing that, cause that seems like the natural way that'll happen by default. So you need to fight the default. Do you have something you do, or is it just sort of inherent to you?

Yeah, I'm just constantly paranoid, and I try to look for metrics that prove that the business is not working or that the businesses degrading or the unit economics are degrading. I think about what are all of the things that could be a meteor that take our business out. And, um, I sort of lean into those things and say, OK, I'm gonna proactively, um, identify and try to resolve those problems. One thing I heard key three boys say once is when you start a company, you should think about all of the reasons that it's not gonna work in all of the reasons that it's going to fail and you should start with that list, make a prioritized list and try to prove that these aren't things that are going to make your company fail and you want to do. That is the first thing, Whereas I think it's very easy for people to do. That is the last thing where they start by getting their co founders and their friends to start working with them,

they start working on the product, they launch the product, and only then do they start asking themselves those questions. You want to start asking yourself those questions upfront before you've written a line of code, I think it's really worthwhile to make a deck or a memo that describes what your business is, why it's gonna work, why it's not gonna work and try toe disapproval of the reasons why it's not gonna work.

Makes sense. And so you're having that meeting now. A tiny co you and a handful of trusted folks. I guess you sort of see the writing on the wall there. Hey, we don't turn this around. This company is not gonna exist in 12 months and 18 million bucks they put into us down the drain. This is not gonna be pretty. And so what happens?

Yeah, it's really hard time at the company because I realize this is happening and I think nobody else on the team is quite realized, and I think they realize that six months later. And so I immediately start thinking about what do we do toe change our business. And I get this guy Andrew Greene, who's our head of business development, and I confide in him and I said, OK, together you and I are gonna figure out how to turn this business around and we come up with a long list of ideas, and then we say, OK, that's not gonna work. That's not gonna work. That's not gonna work. One of the ideas that we come up with is licensing brands from giant media companies and making games using those brands. The number one problem we have the existential problem we have is we can't find a way to get 40 million people to download our game without spending $60 million or $100 million to get 40 million people to go downloaded. And so that's the problem we want to solve. We want toe not have to rely on paid user acquisition to get customers into

our games. So you wanted to leverage the existing brands out there like the in the way that Kim Kardashian put put her name on a game. That game gets a pop in markets itself because her name carries that weight. You wanted to do that? Yeah, exactly. You saw this working or this was just a brilliant idea. Out of nowhere. You saw somebody else doing it. Or how did you get this idea? And why did you think

it would work? Yes, a lot of mobile games. Uh, so this was new in the mobile game space. A lot of console games do this all the time. Um, and a lot of the games I played as a kid growing up do have been have been doing this for generations. I think we just realized that we can apply that playbook toe the mobile game world. People aren't already doing that. It's a huge, wide open opportunity for us to go do it. Um, Apple will be really excited. Our consumers will be really excited. Our employees will be really excited. Uh, this is gonna work.

Love it. And so how do you do it?

So we make a list of brands where we think this brand is so powerful we're gonna be able to get 40 million people to download the game, just based on the fact that I have this brand in the APP store. One of the brands that we come up with is family guy. So there had been a Simpsons game launched and the Simpson came was beginning to do well, and we said, OK, what's like the Simpsons family guy? Let's go try to get the family guy license and making game using that brand. So we go through these Herculean efforts, Teoh, get in front of the Fox team who is actually coincidentally right now in the process of deciding toe license, family guy and whom to license it to. So we realized, Wow, this could actually work. We then kind of android. I kind of bet the farm on making this deal happen.

So we stopped working on Andrew. Nice up. Working on the other games. We just spend 80% of her time trying to close this family guy deal. We make a pitch deck. That is our concept for the game. We go down to L. A. We pitch it to them. They love the concept that we come up with. Its the exact game that everybody who loves the TV show family guy wants to see as a family guy. Mobile game. The guys that meet us at Fox realized Wow, these guys are really passionate about family guy. They have the right idea for what the game should be. Should be bent on these guys.

And so we're competing directly with E. A. Fox had just on a deal with EA on The Simpsons, and that's beginning to show that it's gonna be successful. So they're kind of the incumbent and the team, that team and company that Fox is leaning towards going with already. Zynga shows up and also wants to license the Family Guy game. So we're kind of the smallest company of the three that's competing for it. But we're the ones that need it the most, and we're insatiable about making this happen. So we pitched the idea of them. They love it. We then go back. Teoh San Francisco and we say, Okay, how do we get this deal?

We come up with all of the reasons for why E. A is not the right partner for making the family guy game, but we send that to them way, say, Let's do a call. We want to talk to you about why, where the right partner and he is not. They read it and they think, start thinking, OK, well, these guys are right. There are some problems with the A being the company that we go with, we then say OK, that's good, We're doing great,

but that's not enough. We didn't close the deal. Let's do more so every day. I would go to Andrew and say, What more can we do to get the deal done today? And he was like, There's no more. I have nothing. There's nothing we could come up with And I was like, No, we need to come up with something more Mark and reason is on our board So I called him up and say, Hey, we need your help. How do we get this deal done? He says, Oh,

coincidentally, I'm friends with this guy, Tom Rothman, who used to work at Fox. Call him up. We called Tom roughing up. Tom Rothman is this amazing Hollywood guy who's been making films for decades. He's like, OK, Coincidentally, the guy who is making this decision was my protege at Fox. So let me call him and tell him that they should go with you. I'm also gonna call. We asked Tom Rothman, Can you join our board and call this guy? Tom Rothman is an incredible human being,

where he just says, Look, I'm happy to join your board, but let me call this guy first and see if that's gonna make a difference. Calls this guy and says, I love the tiny co team. I vouch for them. I want you to go with them. These guys are the best guys to make a family guy

mobile game. Wow. What a break. Yeah, amazing moment that he doesn't. And I think so. That's amazing. But then I remember when you first told me the rough outline of the story, the thing I took from it was he came into the office every day and was like, How do we get this deal? You don't ever want to kind of bet the farm on one partnership. That's kind of unlikely to come through. But, you know, the situation called for it where you really didn't have another choice. And I think that asking that question every day, you would have never got to that answer had you not just persistently, annoyingly and almost maniacally asked that question every day. That

is that right? Yeah, absolutely. We did all these things that nobody else in our position I think would have done. And in fact, when we got the deal done with Fox, they said we had to give the deal to you because we were afraid of who else was gonna call us if we didn't do the deal with you guys? We were afraid of what else

you might do next

if we didn't give you

the deal. Just so you end up getting the deal through through Tom's nudge. But this isn't Oh, you know it's not. It's not Rainbows in and dolphins in sunshine. Here, you have. You had a problem that came up after this. Tell the story about that problem. Because this is my favorite part is when I scheduled this podcast, it was because of this story. I think this is an incredible moment that that is inspired me. And I think what it's for many other people. But the only the inspirational moments only come when you're really at rock bottom. And so what happens after this after you get the deal?

Yeah. So, you know, we're really excited that we get the deal. The company is still failing. There's still no clear path Teoh actually succeeding as a company. When we signed the deal with Fox, we signed a deal that says that we're gonna pay them $10 million for the license and that we're gonna pay them $10 million within 30 days. We have $2 million in our bank account. So the first thing we need to do is go convince somebody to give us the money to pay Fox. We goto Silicon Valley Bank and say, Hey, we're making this game. We have all of these other games that are generating all of this revenue. Will you give us alone and through tremendous amounts of cajoling by us and by Mark and recent and Greece Norwitz again, Mark, Really?

Mark really comes through in making the family guy deal happen, and he really comes through in getting svb to step up and give us alone. So they give us a loan of about $10 million. We give $10 million to Fox. We've got a couple $1,000,000 left to go make the game. So that was our first major existential problem after signing the family guy game at the time, have about 160 people at the company, and we realized that that's too many people for where our business is at. We realize that we're not we're gonna run out of money unless we trim unless we sort of decrease the size of the team and decrease our burn rate. We realize that while we're doing the family guy deal while we're trying to get that deal done. And we also realized while we're trying to get the family guy deal done, that we want toe layoff, significant portion of the company. But we can't do that until after the deal is signed by Fox. So deal get signed. We pay them $10 million.

Then we say, Okay, we need to take the team, which is about 150 160 people, and trim that to about 90 people. So I get up in front of the whole company one day and say, Hey, guys, today we're gonna lay off about 80 70 people, and then we go through that process and it takes us the whole day. We take each person that we're gonna lay off one at a time and talk to them and say, Hey, here's your being laid off. Here's what's happening. We're really sorry about this, you know,

that's a really unpleasant experience to this day. Whenever I'm walking around San Francisco, I'll see somebody that I've laid off on that day and you know that person will not look. We'll pretend they don't see me or across the street and not walk by me. And, you know, I totally understand that. I think it's definitely a failing of mine to have gotten us to this point. And so it's It's a reality that I sort of live with every day in a way. So anyway, we lay off about 80 people that day 70 80 people. Then we come back the next morning and say, OK, guys, yesterday really sucked. But today is the beginning of a new era Tiny co.

We're gonna build this game. This game is going to get 40 million downloads because of the family guy brand. Here's all of the marketing ideas that we have that are free and they're going to get us to 40 million downloads. We are going to focus on profitability and we're gonna make this game be profitable and we're going to be profitable off of this game and it's gonna take us about 10 to 12 months to finish making this game. Each of you is necessary to finish making this game. Please stay with the company and please help us. Some people buy into the vision, and then what starts happening is every week we get somebody new coming into to me and saying, Hey, I'm sorry. I've decided to leave the company. I'm gonna work on somewhere

else. That's because morale was down after the layoffs or they just didn't believe what was the was the core reason there

both those things. So I think morale was down. People felt like this is a sinking ship. I better get get off of it immediately instead of waiting for it to completely go under. And even this this guy who was my right hand guy who led our product management team Rajiv Nug poll was like, I don't believe in the strategy. This isn't gonna work out. And so he quit over over this sort of at this time, right? One of the I love marvel of one of the my favorite movies is Iron Man and Iron Man. He's got sort of this artificial heart that's keeping him alive. And I felt like during this whole time period, the only thing that was keeping the company alive was people seeing me in the office people seeing the level of conviction that I had and that if my heart stopped beating for one beat, the company would die and everyone would quit and give up.

Wow. And so you put on a face every day and went in? Yeah. Sorry. Let's of how you actually

feel. Yes. And no matter of what level conviction I actually had, which varied from moment to moment. I went in the office every day and said, We're gonna win this battle. This game is gonna launch. It's gonna be successful and we're gonna do this.

And so you fast forward you guys build in the game. But you don't build the game in time. What happens?

Yes, We have $2 million to finish making and launch the game. Nine or 12 months have gone by and all that money is gone. We've spent it building the game. We were supposed to have launched the game by now, but it's not quite finished, and funny things happen. Start happening like creditors come to our office. There'll be somebody that we're supposed to pay, but we don't have the money to pay them. So they knock on the office and try to meet with me or somebody else and say, Hey, tiny causes unpaid bill of $20,000. You know, it's supposed to been paid two months ago. What's going on? When are you gonna pay me? So that's also a really difficult period

of time. And you're just pretending not to be there. Or how are you dealing with it with this creditor at the door?

Yeah. So we have this person named Susan Steele whose steel willed that's where she got her name. I think she goes and sort of deals with all of that and creates this artificial brick wall. And she does a really good job of figuring out which people do we need to pay right now. Which ones can we sort of pay 30 days, 60 days, 90 days? 100 20 days from now? So she really, uh, handles that

for us, actually. Gotcha. And so you get to the

end. But I do remember one person quit and he quit because he was like, I'm quitting because I signed this contract that says we're gonna pay them and you have not paid them, and I don't want to be at this company anymore, Right? Fair. Yeah. And totally fair. Ah, legit thing to Dio. The guy's a really great, upstanding human being. I really like him, and I've worked with him since then.

Yeah, and this is the thing. I mean, success is not always pretty, right? There is a not just difficulty, but there's just ugly patches where you do something wrong. And then there's consequence of doing it wrong or become short. And now you don't have the money to pay the creditors. And so this this goes all the way to the end where you guys basically run out of money on and they're not able to ship the game. But what? What happens there? What happened?

Yes. So we run out of money. I tell in recent Horowitz and I tell Silicon Valley Bank and both of them are kind of like, Look, we're not gonna put any more money into this company, and I say, OK, find totally understand it. I get that. I missed the deadline that I created for myself. I had invested in this company called Mo Pubs, started by this guy Jim Pain and I'd invested $100,000 into it it got acquired by Twitter in that $100,000 turned into a $1,000,000. So I said, Okay, I just made this $1,000,000. I'm gonna go put that money into the company and that $1,000,000 is gonna be behind the $10 million of debt that we've got from Silicon Valley Bank. And in recent Horowitz also says,

Okay, for every dollar you're putting in, we're gonna put in a dollar, so they put a $1,000,000 as well. So now we've got $2 million.

So you're putting your personal net worth basically into the company in a spot where it's behind all this other debt. See, at this time, do you think you'll ever see this money again or what was the thought process?

Yeah, my my thought was This money is never coming back to me. There's no way that we're gonna be able to pay off Silicon Valley Bank and then be able to pay me off. And financially, I felt like it was the wrong decision to make, but emotionally I just felt like I need to see this through. I got come this far. Just need to see if this game is successful when we launch it and I can't give up. And if what it takes is me putting this money in and losing it toe to turn that card over and find out whether there's an ace in the hole or not, I

got to do it. Unbelievable. And so you you do it. You put the money in, um, stomachs in knots of assuming and it does the company even know that you're putting your own personal net worth into the company at this point? Or is this a sort of your

your secret? Yeah. So it's something I keep secret. Only me and Susan Seal. No in our investors in Silicon Valley Bank. No, the last thing you want to do is tell the your team that OK, we've We ran out of money yesterday. There's there's nobody backing us, but except for me, that's not a good thing. Toe tell anybody. So I keep

that to myself. Gotcha. Okay, So you you end up shipping the game off this sort of bridge that gives you how many months

that gives us the time that we need. Maybe another 60 days or so or 90 days toe finish. So we launch it. And you know, our goal was to get the top spot in the APP store featuring we spent sort of six months talking to Apple and wooing them and telling them about how great the game was and all of the marketing that we were doing to support it. Fox does ads on television Andrew Green and Mike Sandwich come up with this great marketing strategy where we have an event in L. A. That all these press show up to get everyone who's a family guy fan to be amped up about it. So I come into the office the day that we launched the game. We see that the absolute featuring is bad, and I think, Oh, fuck, this company just died

would mean its bad. What's bad is not there or it's just its future

is we expect that the featuring is gonna drive tens of millions of downloads over the next seven days and the featuring spot that Apple gives us his bat. So it's not going to do that. So I coming in the office, see that and say, OK, this company, it's over. This is not gonna work and I leave the office at noon when I see this featuring, and we just launched the

game And where did you go?

I just went home and watched Netflix for two hours and fell asleep because I was so tired. I was just like, Okay, I gotta move on with the rest of my life. This chapter is over and the bet that we made failed. So I fall asleep, I wake up the next day, I immediately go to look at our stats, and I'm like, Oh, we just generated $400,000 in revenue yesterday. So this is working.

Holy fuck, This is actually working. We're

winning. I run to the office and, like, rally the team and say, Wow, this is working. We did it, guys. And, um, it's just an amazing moment of joy and pride for the whole team. So many people work so hard, and I was really glad to see it work.

Amazing. And so that game takes off. You guys have since gone on to build. You know, the family guy games the Harry Potter games. I mean, that's incredible. You get the license to that. That huge franchise, and so Where did the company go from? There just kind of get to the kind of the sort of the end of the tiny co chapter for you?

Yes. So the day we launched the Family Guy game, it's about 75 people. We go with the team to about 150 people. We launch a Marvel game. We sign a Harry Potter deal and working on a Harry Potter game, the Family guy game goes on to do more than 100 50 maybe 200 million in revenue. At this point, we can offer to buy the business. We hire an investment banker, this guy named Dick Philippine needed who helps us get a couple more offers. We sell the business. The year that we sell, we do. We're doing about 85 million and revenue 15 million and Ebola 150 people at the time.

Amazing. And so you've since you saw you sell Tiny Co. And have since gone on to do a couple of their interesting things You, you and your brother started, come to called native native deodorant and all natural deodorant that, you know, started in the bedroom and is now sold and target. It was bought by Procter and Gamble on dso. Wanna just get your take on, I guess. Like how do you even think of your own story since tiny girl like what do you What jumps out to you as the highlights of what you've been up to since then and we'll get into where you want to go from here.

Yeah, I think one of the highlights is definitely working with my brother on Native. So we're living together at the time and what he does is he goes and buys deodorant from etc. And we test it at home. So we put some of the deodorant that we bought from etc. Under each of our armpits. We go run a mile on, then we sniff each other's armpit to see. Is this deodorant actually

good? A highly scientific.

It's totally unscientific, but also very effective. And we eliminate all these terrible deodorants from etc. That are not effective. And we find one that works and he takes that and brands it native and starts marketing it Over time, he changes the formula and makes the product better

and better. Did you think it would be big at that time. Or are you just happy to run a mile and be a guinea pig with different deodorant under your armpits? Or did you see like, yeah, this is gonna be It's gonna end up being huge, cause I remember when you first told me about it sounded like a cute business. It sounded, you know, cool niche. But, you know, didn't really get a sense that it would get to the size that it did. And eventually, you know, Procter and Gamble sees this is something that it has to buy in a sort of nine figure transaction. That's not there. Wasn't obvious at the beginning.

Yeah, Um, definitely not obvious at the beginning that you can build a meaningful business selling $12 or deodorant over the Internet. Like, you know, my I think my brother had the faith. I didn't have the faith in the business, but I had the faith in him, and I'd say the sort of greatest joy of my career has been, you know, working with him and seeing him succeed and helping native succeed. One of the weird things I find about working is I remember when I was graduating. I was like, You know, I want to be rich. I want to be successful and over time it's been really surprising to me how much more joy and pride I take when other people are successful and when other people's careers sort of leap frog. Because they worked at Tiny Co.

Where Native where Anything that I've worked on. So, yeah, I think that it was really great to work with him on native and really, he started the business and ran in. I provided some advice, brotherly advice and helped him sell the

business. Love it. And so and then you kind of went back to the old formula. You went back to your parents house just to visit, got bored, spun up a new business. I know we can't talk too much about it because it's in a stealth mode right now. Normally, stealth mode is like a pre like a lame thing when when most people come to me with a stealth idea that forget even talk about, it's because they don't even know what they're doing there so insecure about it that they don't want to talk about it, and they really haven't done anything yet, but this is different. This is the company is up and running. It's generating a ton of revenue. You're keeping it quiet. Totally respect that. So we won't go into what it is and how it works.

Maybe for, you know, the future podcast. When you when you come back in to tell the story of what's going on here. But you did go back to that formula. So I want to take the last 10 minutes here and do rapid fire questions. So first thing that comes to mind, first answer is the best answer of a couple of random off the wall questions. So, uh, let's take a little sip of water. Get get Teoh, Get to the rapid fire. Okay, so if you were 21 years old today, you know, same put same you. But you just graduated today from college. What

do you think you'd work on? So I think that I would work on something in the biology space on genetics or ah, bioengineering. I think in the last 20 years, what we've seen is the Internet revolution and the computer revolution in the mobile phone revolution. I think the next 20 years is gonna be about hacking our bodies, packing genetics, being able to serve design babies before they're born, eliminate disease at the genetic level. I think

you heard the Peter Till question of you know, what's something that you believe to be true that few others

would agree with you on. One of the things I believe is that, uh, engineering is becoming a commodity in Silicon Valley and that the next generation of entrepreneurs air gonna be not necessarily technical, but people who are more well rounded in their skill

set. If you could buy a billboard on the 101 here in San Francisco and you've got tens of thousands of people who are driving by it every day is just a blank billboard, and you could write any one message that whole bunch of people would see every day. What would you write on that billboard?

I think it's two things. One for people who don't live in Silicon Valley and have never lived in Silicon Valley, I would say moved to Silicon Valley. It will improve your life, and you'll be better off 10 years from now because I think the culture of silicon Valley is really positive in making you realise that you could sort of will your hands in mind into making things that matter in the world on that anybody could do it with any skill set. Any experience everybody in Silicon Valley is treats everyone else like they could be the next Mark Zuckerberg and I really like living in a place where you're almost afraid to be mean to somebody because they could end up being successful powerful

here. It doesn't matter what your last name is. Doesn't matter. Your age doesn't matter. Your resume doesn't matter. Your school you went to everybody even, you know, you see somebody with a hoody on in a bar, hoody and flip flops and sort of here. The default assumption is that that might be that might be the next sec, right? And so you don't sort of judge the book by their cover here, you wait to see what are they working on, what are their ideas and what they're capable of? So my last one is something that, you know, I believe is an important question.

Everybody should ask themselves. The question is, what's something that comes easily to you? that you see is quite difficult for others. I say this important question. You know what you think of your answer because for most people we spent a lot of time doing things that we're really bad at trying to get better at them because we think that that's what will improve things. But often it's better to figure out what something that comes really easy to you, something you're really good at or you don't mind doing the other people seem to mind doing or other people really struggle with, because that can be sort of the foundation that you use. I'm curious for you what something that comes easily to you that you noticed does not come so easily to others.

I think it's faith. I think that a lot of people, I sort of just believe that whatever I'm working on is gonna succeed over time. And I think I see a lot of people that kind of lose faith in what they're working on too quickly or they'll have faith or lose faith on a regular basis. So I think for me it's having faith and having a sense of urgency, like I wake up every day and run to the office and say, How can we win today? What do we need to do to win today? Those two things just come really easily. Reason

Do you have the opposite? Something that you noticed comes easily to others. But you find really difficult for yourself to be able to

do discipline for other people. It seems to me like the can be really disciplined about their schedule and time in, like, it's my goal toe Work out every day. And I probably work out about 50% of days at best. And other people will say I need to work out every day and they'll just be able to do it

Nice. And last question Winds

are next workout. Let's go right after this.

Okay, Fantastic. All right. Silly has been amazing having you here. I knew you would be an awesome guest for the podcast. Even though you don't like to do podcast. You like to talk too much about yourself, but I think this is is an episode I would have wanted to listen to. So I thank you for coming.

My pleasure. I think you're going to do a great job. I'm so excited to see who else you have on the podcast.